Wood is a renewable resource that is ideally suited for heating homes and businesses. The use of wood as a home heating source is likely to increase as the cost of fossil fuels increases. Typically, trees are cut down and the tree trunks and branches are split to a smaller size for burning. Since wood (especially newly sawn wood) can be heavy, it is desirable to split the wood near the location where the tree was felled. For most wood burning applications, it is desirable to split the wood to a length of less than about 2 feet for easy placement in stoves, fireplaces, camp fires, furnaces, or other wood burning devices.
Cutting trees and hauling branches out of a forest to a central wood splitting location is hard work and can be expensive. In addition, the manual labor of splitting logs takes time and can be physically taxing. For these reasons, consumers desire log splitters that are easy to transport and to use.